September 9th, 2013 by Josh Linden

Seagate today announced details about its new Ultra Mobile HDD, designed as part of a Mobile Enablement Kit that aimed at manufacturers of tablets and other portable devices. At 5mm thick and 3.3oz in weight, the 2.5" Ultra Mobile HDD is set to allow tablets to incorporate storage capacity on par with a laptop. Leveraging a system-integrated flash cache module to improve performance, shock tolerance, and power consumption, the Mobile Enablement Kit is positioned to provide a high capacity and affordable alternative to mobile devices that rely exclusively on flash storage.

Portable storage is subjected to extremes of operation compared to most other mass storage scenarios, such as physical shock, temperature, and performance. These operating conditions, in addition to the required space footprint for hard drives inside the device chassis, have limited the use of HDDs in portable designs to date. Seagate says that the Mobile Enablement Kit and the Ultra Mobile HDD have proven their robustness during simulated device drops by consumers and will provide a comparable user experience to current portable flash storage in terms of power consumption and performance.

Seagate 500GB Ultra Mobility HDD Specifications (ST500LT035)

Interface: SATA 6Gb/s

Cache (MB): 16

Zero Gravity Sensor (ZGS): Yes

Performance

Seek Average, Read (ms) <13

Seek Average, Write (ms) <15

Max. Sustained Data Transfer Rate OD (MB/s): 100

Max. Data Transfer Rate (MB/s): 600

Bytes per Sector (logical/physical): 512/4096

Reliability/Data Integrity

Load/Unload Cycles: 600,000

Nonrecoverable Read Errors per Bits Read: Max 1 per 10E14

Power Management

Startup Power, Typical (A): 1.0

Seek, Typical (W): 1.4

Idle, Typical (W): 0.48

Operating Temperature (°C): 0 to 60

Nonoperating Temperature (°C): −40 to 70

Operating Shock (Gs): 2ms 400

Nonoperating Shock (Gs): 1ms 1000

Acoustics (bels)

Idle, Typical: 2.0

Seek, Typical: 2.2

Physical

Height (mm/in): 5.0/0.197

Width (mm/in): 69.85/2.75

Depth (mm/in): 100.35/3.95

Weight (g/lb): 93/0.205

Halogen Free: Yes

RoHS Compliance: Yes

The Seagate Mobile Enablement Kit is built around the Dynamic Data Driver for Android. The Dynamic Data Driver employs intelligent caching design at the system level to avoid physically integrating the flash cache into the drive. The Dynamic Data Driver also manages an array of sensors in order to track motion and temperature. When free-fall is detected, the driver communicates with the drive outside of the standard SATA interface in order to minimize damage upon impact.

Availability

Seagate has not yet announced pricing and availibility details for the Mobile Enablement Kit. The Seagate Ultra Mobile HDD will be available both as part of the kit and separately.